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New Scientist Book Club: Read an extract from Kim Stanley Robinson’s sci-fi classic Red Mars

Bluish-white water ice clouds hang above the Tharsis volcanoes on Mars NASA/JPL/MSSS Mars was empty before we came. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by…

Georgia man brings abandoned VHS tapes back to life

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Have you ever walked into an old garage or antique store, seen a VHS tape gathering dust and wondered: would those sad old pieces…

This quantum computing breakthrough may not be what it seemed

A team of researchers led by Sergey Frolov, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, along with collaborators from Minnesota and Grenoble, carried out a series of replication studies focused on topological effects in nanoscale superconducting and semiconducting devices….

Bethesda is shutting down The Elder Scrolls: Blades on June 30

It’s a sad day for the dozens of players still grinding The Elder Scrolls: Blades. Bethesda announced that it’s permanently shutting down the servers for its free-to-play mobile spinoff on June 30. First spotted on Reddit, The Elder Scrolls: Blades…

Red Rooms makes online poker as thrilling as its serial killer

It’s rare for a movie to get technology right. And it’s even rarer for that movie to be a thriller or horror, where realism takes a backseat to scares and tension. But Red Rooms mostly gets it. Nothing takes me…

The Pixel 10a doesn’t have a camera bump, and it’s great

For years now, smartphone makers have made the camera bump on devices bigger in order to chase camera improvements. Even if that kind of design makes cameras better, at times, it creates usability issues. With the Pixel 10a, Google took…

A School District Tried to Help Train Waymos to Stop for School Buses. It Didn’t Work

One of the purported advantages of self-driving car tech is that every car can learn from one vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo puts it on its website: “The Waymo Driver learns from the collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including…

Why Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars is still a classic, 34 years on

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars Terese Loeb Kreuzer/Alamy 2026 marks the dawn of a momentous era: humankind taking our first steps towards colonising Mars. Later this year, NASA’s ESCAPADE probes will fly to the surface of the Red…

From memory cards to SSDs: How long will your digital media storage actually last? 

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. We never fully lost our love for physical media. Tangible copies of music, movies, and books have never been completely obsolete. In fact, collecting…

This hidden state of water could explain why life exists

Researchers at Stockholm University have used advanced x-ray lasers to uncover a long-suspected feature of water: a critical point that appears when water is deeply supercooled. This occurs at about -63 °C and 1000 atmosphere. Even under everyday conditions, this…